Best of the Decade: Books

December 31, 2009

I had planned to crown this series of “Best of the Decade” posts by looking at books, but that plan has fizzled. The trouble is that I’ve read very few books published this decade — so few, in fact, that the exercise hardly seems worthwhile. I’ll give a short list, but mainly I’d like to use this post to solicit recommendations for good books published between 2000-2009.

My favourites, culled from a list of a couple of dozen eligible volumes, are these:

David Bentley Hart — The Beauty of the Infinite (2003): It took me about six months to work my way through this book, and I understood very little of it — I never grasped the meaning of analogia entis, and this proved a tragic fault — but it was still a great pleasure to read, if only for Hart’s brilliant rhetorical flourishes. (Try this one.) Millinerd agrees that it is a great book, and he says why.

David Heald — Architecture of Silence (2000): A book of black and white photographs of Cistercian monasteries. It is a very beautiful and surprisingly instructive book that quietly conveys something of the spirit of Cistercian devotion.

Cormac McCarthy — The Road (2006): Quiet and austere on each page, but devastating in its cumulative effect, this was among the most memorable novels I read this decade. (Book Note)

Alex Ross — The Rest is Noise (2007): A fascinating overview of twentieth-century history told through its music. (Book Note)

Tom Wolfe — I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004): An unpretentious and heart-breaking portrait of the moral decline and fall of a bright-eyed young woman on one of America’s elite college campuses. (Book Note)

As I said above, I would like to hear about your favourite books of the decade. Feel free to leave a comment.

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If, for amusement’s sake, I relax the constraint I have been observing and admit for consideration anything I read this decade, regardless of when it was first published, I arrive at a different set of favourites. Leaving aside those widely acknowledged as classics (The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, Hamlet, Pride and Prejudice, The Confessions, and so on), my list includes:

John Gerard, S.J. — Autobiography of an Elizabethan (1609): A fascinating first-hand account of life in the Jesuit underground during the reign of Elizabeth I. (Book Note)

Søren Kierkegaard — The Sickness Unto Death (1849): A rather personal choice, this book found me at the right time, and has had lasting good effects in my life.

C. S. Lewis — The Discarded Image (1964): This is perhaps the best book I know about the medieval period in Europe. Lewis, with great sympathy and insight, describes the worldview of medieval men, helping us to see the world as they saw it. (Book Note)

Thomas Mann — Doctor Faustus (1947): A seriously great story about music, ambition, and the decline of Western culture. Too big to grasp in one reading, but I grasped enough to recognize its worth.

Herman Melville — Moby-Dick (1851): A glorious and heroic eruption of a book. Reading it was probably the greatest purely literary pleasure I had this decade. (Book Note)

Vladimir Nabokov — Pale Fire (1962): By a wide margin the best murder mystery that I have read. It is an amazing genre-busting tour de force by Nabokov, and a hilarious one too.

Josef Pieper — Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1952): A book that brings together many of the central themes of Pieper’s work. It is a tremendously insightful, wise, and thought-provoking book that ought to be far more widely read.

Kenneth Grahame — The Wind in the Willows (1908): Somehow I missed reading this when I was a child, but it is a book for adults too, and I took great delight in it.

The more that I think about the Road, the more I think that McCarthy is offering us a vision of an apocalypse that has already occurred. One can see all the conditions that the protagonists face as analogous to the moral, spiritual, and intellectual worlds we live in.

That’s an interesting idea, Janet — very interesting. The fact that McCarthy doesn’t really try to ground his story in history makes it especially amenable, I would think, to interpretations like this.